Modeling of greenhouse radiant heating

Abstract

Commercially available greenhouses are commonly used for provision of year-round growing of agricultural crops at protected ground. In order to provide favorable conditions for plants growth these agricultural constructions should be equipped by artificial heating systems in cold sea-sons. This work presents an overview of basic traditional and alternative heating systems which find their applications in agriculture. Advantages of application of roof radiant heating with infrared radiation sources for green-houses are discussed. It was discovered that now there is no appropriate mathematical model of greenhouse radiant heating, which takes into account both heat and mass exchange processes. Here we propose a mathematical model of radiant heating, which includes equation system of both heat and mass exchange processes for greenhouse, its enclosure and soil. The numer-ical calculations were performed for commercially available greenhouse “Farmer 7.5”. We investigated the impact of external air temperature and heat exchange rate on the following greenhouse radiant heating characteris-tics: internal air temperature, heating system thermal power and water dis-charge for soil watering.